New Pew Internet report on teen search skills. Pew surveyed teachers of intelligent Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands teenagers. Teachers filled in a multi-choice question survey, asking them about online research skills among their advanced students. There’s nothing unexpected in the summary, and several hints at some rosy-eyed visions of the past…

“What was once a slow process that ideally included intellectual curiosity and discovery is becoming a faster-paced, short-term exercise aimed at locating just enough information to complete an assignment.”

Predictably… Google, Wikipedia, and YouTube head the pack as the first port of call in a homework research task.

One figure that did seem of note is that 78% of such teachers say that in-school website censorship filters have either a major or minor effect on their teaching.

The new socialist government in France is making ridiculous noises over taxing Web links. It threatens to pass a new law: if a Web link leads to an online press article, then an unspecified ‘fee’ will need to be paid. Paid even if that article is freely and openly published online, it seems. Paid even if the link comes from overseas, potentially.

The proposed law is targeted first at Google News, but a fundamental threat to the existing Web links ecosystem seems obvious. The new law reportedly has the highest backing — the French Culture minister appears to love the notion. Which would seem to suggest that their new government just doesn’t understand the Web.

Leaving aside issues of ‘fair use’, and the seeming inability of French publishers to monetize around four billion Google visits a month, one wonders if France has really considered the consequences of its planned law. Is France prepared to risk a worldwide online protest over its threat to the fundamental ‘freedom to link’ and to the open Web? The highly successful ‘SOPA blackout’ protest of January 2012 showed what could be done. Will the French Culture minister be so breezy if a big chunk of inbound French links are simply wiped off the Web for a period, perhaps coinciding with France’s peak online holiday-bookings week for overseas tourists? All it would take is one techie to whip up a simple script for webmasters that diverts outbound traffic headed for France. To a picture of a French poodle, perhaps.

A fledgling but interesting new project aims to open up British universities. Fruni is short for “Free Range University”. If I’ve got it right, it sounds rather like a cheap bottom-up version of The Great Courses (aka the Teaching Company). It’ll be interesting to see if Fruni puts lectures online as free-for-all, funded by advertising.

Just published, an interesting new survey essay by Teresa Vilarino Picos, “The Library and the Librarian as a Theme in Literature”. Available as full-text.

Publishers Weekly has a perceptive new article on the future of ebooks, A Soft Landing on Normandy…

“Almost every single startup that is delivering authoring tools — either for designing and producing content, maintaining a full-bore content management system, or simply supporting an interim level of annotations or fragmentation — is building their own proprietary web-based layer that is largely HTML5-based yet also capable of linking to software development kits and libraries needed to support the export of rich app experiences. In other words, everything is baroque, and nothing in the standards space works well enough across the range of possible uses to be a default rendering environment. It is very much as if we are back in the Middle Ages scribbling on parchment, whittling our own quills from feathers we have on hand, drawing up whatever ink we have available. Our 21st Century parchment is a world-wide digital canvas, but our quills are hand-crafted.”

That can potentially make sense for presenting high quality specialist non-fiction/textbooks with complex layouts, which I’d suggest is where these startups may be going with these tools. If they can create a system easy enough for small and mid-sized publishers to use, but which can produce faithful / easy-to-update / app-friendly expensive non-fiction in iPad editions, then they stand a chance of a buyout by a major publisher — who might then polish and sell the system to smaller publishers, along with a rights lock-in.

The Waters Art Museum has added 17,900 new images to the Wikimedia Commons. Google’s indexed them all, and so they can now be searched via Google Images thus…

site:http://commons.wikimedia.org/ “Walters Art Museum”

Filtering by 2 megapixel size shows that the Walters Art Museum now has 14,400 decently-sized images accessible via Google Images, and they’re without watermarks. The test download image I tried was found to be at 300dpi. The licence is Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike — somewhat questionable, since the works that are in the public domain might more usefully be CC Attribution.

A new Creative Commons search page on Vimeo, the hipsters’ video hosting service.

WikiPaintings is a new online encyclopedia of painting. It’s pretty well stocked, as well as having a nice clean interface. It mixes public domain works with copyright works, and sadly there’s no way to filter to get “just the public domain works, above 1800px in size” in search results.

Although you can go in via Google Images, with the following search:

site:http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/ “artwork is in the public domain”

This gets about 90,000 results. You can then refine by size in pixels.